How to Stop Psyching Yourself Out When You Need Confidence Fast

5 min readSep 26, 2022

Being a human being is playing head games with yourself under the best circumstances. And you don’t always win. Knowing how to stop psyching yourself out in a pinch can help you live to fight another day in those head games.

I am a person who remembers the nineties with fondness and confusion as to how we got through life without GPS or cell phones. To sike, or psych yourself out was a crime. Only could the biggest of school bus bullies sike you out. And that bully also had to yell “SIKE” while doing it.

The psych yourself out meaning I’m after today is the one where you’re in your head. The most common don’t psych yourself out synonym these days is get out of your own way, but I’m not a white influencer, so I don’t feel comfortable saying that.

Instead, I want to talk about how to stop psyching yourself out when you don’t have a lot of time to do the work.

And as always, remember, it doesn’t have to be perfect. Like everything else on this blog, we are going to do this shit real messy.

The Long Journey of Not Psyching Yourself Out

I have this whole post on how I learned to not psych myself out and it’s definitely good if you’re on a journey to learn to trust your gut and follow through with your intentions. But it’s not a quick fix. We’ll get to the quick and dirty psych up in a second. For now, let’s be real.

Like most worthwhile things, it’s going to take time to believe you can do the big scary things, and there’s some significant work in that. You don’t always have time for that work.

But if getting to a point where you can do stuff without questioning yourself, or at least push through that questioning, taking imperfect action and enjoying it takes time. It’s not a linear path, and there are setbacks aplenty!

You can definitely do it. And if you don’t have time at the moment and need to stop psyching yourself out fast, then I’ve got some steps for you to follow.